Companies rise quickly and fall even faster. Headlines fill with dazzling valuations, only for the same names to disappear a few years later. What remains, when the noise fades, are the rare businesses that endure. Endurance is never accidental; it comes from structure, discipline, and models that can withstand time and pressure. The difference between a fleeting venture and a lasting company often comes down to how leaders measure success and what they are willing to ignore.
Against this backdrop, the voices that matter most are not those selling the promise of disruption but those demanding proof of durability. These are the people who insist that a company’s relevance must extend beyond a quarter or a news cycle. Among them is Furkat Kasimov, an entrepreneur, investor, and author, whose work has consistently returned to the same question: will it last? His perspective cuts through the performance often surrounding startups, and his record as both operator and investor gives him license to demand answers that others avoid.
Demanding more than theater
Kasimov’s clarity was on display in 2025 as he served as a judge across four startup competitions: the Globee Awards for Artificial Intelligence and TechRound’s FinTech, AI Tech, and SaaS competitions. The founders he evaluated came armed with pitches, visions, and market stories. His lens, however, remained unchanging. He asked whether the company would still be relevant in five years. He questioned whether the model required constant heroics or whether it naturally sustained itself. He pressed on whether a competent but uncelebrated CEO could defend its moat through systems rather than charisma. And he wanted proof of movement in the most recent quarter.
“I’m not grading theater,” Kasimov said. “I’m grading durability.” The distinction is sharp. Many companies win audiences with style, but style fades quickly. His measure is progress grounded in numbers, systems, and models that remain stable even when attention drifts away. For him, hype is not only distracting, it is dangerous. It breeds a false sense of momentum that vanishes the moment scrutiny begins.
This stance is born of experience. According to Kasimov, he co-founded LeadsMarket.com in 2011 and scaled it from zero to near a nine-figure annual revenue without outside capital. Proprietary ad-tech and an obsession with data science carried the business forward. Before that, at InsuranceLeads.com, he was pushing mobile applications and search optimization practices that were considered bold at the time. These experiences gave him the instinct to spot fragility long before it cracks.
Building, investing, and Futurisk
The discipline that guided Kasimov in his operating years is the same one he applies to investing. His portfolio includes exposure to several high-profile technology and fintech companies, primarily through late-stage funding rounds and secondary market purchases. His current investment portfolio includes a diverse mix of technology-driven companies across sectors such as financial services, mobility, automation, cybersecurity, healthcare technology, and logistics. He is quick to dismiss the idea that this is about collecting brand names. For him, it is context, a record that explains why he interrogates founders on real unit economics and defensible moats.
One concept he developed is what he calls Futurisk, a way of mapping risks that may surface tomorrow rather than reacting only when they appear. It demands tough scenarios: a platform suddenly changes its rules overnight, consent and privacy standards grow tighter across industries, and artificial intelligence, once a differentiator, becomes so widely available that the gap between competitors disappears.
The goal of Futurisk is not to feed pessimism but to prepare for inevitabilities. History shows that many promising ventures fail not because they lacked vision but because they could not withstand external shifts. Futurisk makes resilience an active discipline. Kasimov believes that unless founders test themselves against such scenarios, they are building on sand.
At LeadsMarket, his own tenure demonstrated the weight of this discipline. Beyond co-founding, he served as product owner for internal platforms and SaaS tools like LeadPlatform and BigDataManager. He built a global affiliate network and an online training academy that put thousands of marketers through structured programs. He described his model as win-win-win-win, value created for consumers, suppliers, buyers, and the company. On slides, the idea looks polished. In execution, he admits, it is grueling. Yet the system was designed so that a competent operator could run it without depending on daily acts of heroism.
AI, productivity, and lessons in survival
Kasimov often distills his view of productivity into a formula: AI + HI = PI. Artificial intelligence combined with human intelligence leads to productivity improvements. Machines take on the heavy lifting, but humans remain essential for judgment, taste, and accountability. His investment choices reflect this formula. He gravitates toward services where AI lowers costs without cutting quality.
The results are visible. In cybersecurity, autonomous penetration testing paired with expert oversight has pushed continuous testing into budgets once reserved for large enterprises. In marketing, even small boutiques can now create on-model photography and multilingual campaign videos without the prohibitive costs of studios and film crews. These examples reflect his conviction that the real opportunity is not in replacing humans but in making premium services accessible to a wider base.
Mistakes, however, remain his sharpest concern. His book, Don’t Do This: A Guide to Business Survival, serves as a catalog of errors that leaders too often repeat until they become embedded in culture. It is not written to entertain but to warn. In 2025, his work in multilingual AI-driven video also earned three AVA Digital Awards, reinforcing his belief that when machines and humans work together, the result is more than potential cost savings; it is meaningful output.
The playbook that guides him remains straightforward: select a premium service, unbundle the process, automate what machines handle best, leave the nuanced decisions to humans, and set prices within reach of Main Street businesses. For Kasimov, this is not theory; it is the path to companies that outlast cycles and leave a legacy of accessibility. He argues that founders who build with these principles will write stories measured not in headlines but in endurance.
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